Some of you might have noticed, there was a countdown on my website. So what has happened … I have decided that it was time to move on to new challenges. So I quit my job at Vodafone after nearly 15 years and joined VMware at the 1st of April 2016 as Senior Technical Support Engineer.

Currently I’m really busy by doing a lot of trainings, exam’s and meeting a lot of interesting people mostly in Cork.

The release of vSphere 6 is already exciting but there is one additional extrem cool new product from VMware called VIO (VMware Integrated OpenStack). It is an fully automated setup of an complete OpenStack environment based on VMware. I will try it asap because I’m playing around with OpenStack since a long time and it is definitely not an easy setup. Additionally as stated on the VMware page “Available for free for all customers with vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus or vCloud Suite.” it’s included in some of the licenses.

If you run machines in a cloud or in a restriced environment where direct ssh is a security risk it could be a good way forward to use a HTML5 based solution. Guacamole is such an solution. It is a clientless remote access system. It is just required to install Tomcat to run the web application and a proxy deamon. The solution can connect to SSH (including key authentication), Windows RDP and VNC. As authentication backend they offer LDAP, Mysql and a file based solution.

I’m using Guacamole in multiple environments with an Apache in front for SSL. The tomcat is only available on localhost which improves the security. Furthermore it is possible to develop additional authentication providers. Based on that it should be possible to in corporate Guacamole in the single sign on solution which is available in most of the large companies.

Last week I started to play around with Openstack in combination with VMware vCenter. I used Devstack as baseline and configured the VMware support. I wasn’t expecting that it will directly work but it did. The configuration is described in the OpenStack Wiki.
As environment I used 3 HP Dl360 G7 (2xQuad Core, 96GB Memory, 500GB SAN Storage), running VMware vSphere 5.5 with the vCenter appliance.

• Enhanced vMotion support, enabling virtual machines to be migrated between hosts and clusters that do not have shared storage

• Support for the latest Intel and AMD CPUs along with support for Microsoft Windows 8

• Bundling of VMware® vShield Endpoint™ as part of the core vSphere product
Along with the core platform improvements, vSphere 5.1 provides the following several virtual machine–related enhancements:

• Support for up to 64 vCPUs per virtual machine, doubling the number of support vCPUs from vSphere 5.0

• Enhanced CPU virtualization, enabling the passing of low-level CPU counters and other physical CPU attributes directly to the virtual machine, where they can be accessed by the guest OS

• Introduction of virtual machine compatibility, making it easier to identify and track virtual machine capabilities removes ambiguity regarding virtual machine upgrades and helps eliminate pressure to keep up with an ever increasing virtual hardware version. For VMware View environments, vSphere 5.1 puts in place the following critical enabling technologies that will be used with future releases of View: